education (Photo credit: Sean MacEntee)
Dr Alf asks if UK State Education should be outsourced.
Bad as the UK State education system is, the answer must be no because the system is fixable provided the Government is prepared to act ruthlessly and at speed.
The steps that need to be followed are:
1) Derecognise all the teaching unions, and if this latest strike goes ahead, dismiss all of them involved en mass and replace them with teachers from countries with a better education system at State level than ours. We have 43 to choose from because our system has fallen to 44th place in the world
2) Create an American style troops to teachers programme and put ex Army Officers into schools as Head Teachers and converted former soldiers as teachers and strong male role models
3) Sack the 20,000 not fit for purpose teachers already identified by OFSTED and remove all underperforming heads and replace those with ex Army officers.
Those who are sacked should be dismissed for industrial misconduct and given no dole for 6 weeks to concentrate their minds and the minds of militant Postmen who are strangely also about to go on strike at the same time
4) Benchmark against Finland, South Korea and Singapore and create a dynamic Force field Analysis. Then develop a fully resourced plan to catch up within 4 years.
5) Increase school hours to 8 per day excluding compulsory homework
6) Reintroduce whole class teaching
7) Scrap trendy teaching methods such as “differentiated learning”,insistence on “wow factor” and the idea that pupils are there to have fun. They are there to learn and be subjected to discipline
8) Introduce Saturday schools for slow learners, those who misbehave and disrupt lessons
9) Place the children from the 120,000 dysfunctional families into boarding schools run by the Army and start the school-day even earlier, with a bed inspection, tough physical exercise and a good breakfast to prepare them for study
10) Introduce compulsory classes on Stoicism and philosophies that are enabling plus Pimsleur style language teaching of Mandarin, Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish.
11) Teach time management and personal organisation.
Stop teaching useless languages like Welsh or translating things into that language
12) Reduce the UK annual holiday entitlement to 4 weeks, abolish all Bank Holidays and Half Terms except for Christmas
This would rise in increments subject to UK worker productivity rising to Global top decile levels and academic results putting the UK into the top decile within 3 years
13) People of other faiths could have their own private schools as now but would have to cover all the same core material as the State system and they would get no more holiday than anyone else.
Learning the Koran, Hindu texts, Buddhist texts and the Torah etc would be treated as extra curricular activity
Thus Ramadam, Eid, Diwali, Jewish New Year etc would not be allowed as excuses for people (teachers, pupils, heads or parents) taking time off on weekdays
14) Improve school meals,the nutritional content of food and stop allowing the building of fast food and junk food outlets within 5 miles of a school
15) Eliminate E numbers and harmful chemicals in food and water
16) Ban fluoride which reduces IQ by up to 20% as evidenced by what the Nazis gave concentration camp victims in their water to make inmates easier to manage
17) Follow the French system of holding back slow learners in particular subjects for another year
18) Re introduce streaming by subject
19) Create Business Boot Camps as a halfway house between school and work for the less academically inclined to learn to create their own businesses
20) Assign University places according to which subjects are economically necessary and subject to a GMAT test
John Gelmini
Dr Alf's Blog 